Residential Building Confignon

Selective Competition, Confignon, 2019
Weyell Zipse & Hörner with Truwant+Rodet and Philippe Convercey Landscape Architect

The municipality of Confignon, a suburb of Geneva, is planning the construction of a replacement building for urban apartments in the immediate vicinity of the village square. The project is the result of an examination of the question of what living in rural areas means today. The majority of residential typologies in Confignon consist of detached single-family houses or small terraced houses. Neighborly relationships and spatial references to the landscape are characterized by this. The housing types benefit from multi-sided orientations, and terraced houses are accessed via shared staircases as communal threshold spaces.

The project proposal ties in with these spatial and social relationships and attempts to find a translation in the typology of the multi-storey residential building, while the existing urban structure is unpretentiously continued. The access space of the stairwell plays a key role here. This space extends through the building and ensures visual and pedestrian permeability from the street to the courtyard. The area of the entrance hall on the first floor is converted into a winter garden on the upper floors, which is shared by two units. In the social fabric of the development, the space functions as a typological hybrid, a private outdoor space and a neighborhood meeting zone. We understand this as a spatial offer, the exact use of which is deliberately kept open at the exit. The entrance is directly adjacent to the kitchen, but at the same time visually demarcated. Each apartment has a second, spacious, private outdoor space on the courtyard side. The apartments allow for diagonal views through the building structure and curves that ensure a spacious layout in a small space. Structurally, the building consists of prefabricated timber construction elements.

In the basement there is a publicly accessible underground parking garage, the access to which is provided with daylight via a topographical modulation of the site and, together with the common room and the outdoor space in front, forms a public focal point of the development.